The EMPIRE Of JUSTICE HELPS DEFEAT EMPIRES Of EVIL
Thus if a tribe wants to survive, it helps to be more moral than the opposition. Morality does not guarantee survival, but it helps to insure it. The extermination of the Xi Xia civilization, the greatest Buddhist empire which ever was, by the Mongols, is a case in point. They had made an enemy who looked insignificant… until he came back, at the head of the best army of the times.
Minorities ruling vast empires have existed before. The Mongol empire extended from Croatia to Iran, India and South China. Yet, the Mongol army was composed of only twenty tumens of 10,000 cavaliers each (they recruited many helpers, and defectors, local, or not, though, fighting the Song, the southern Chinese with Iraqi gunners, and into Europe with Chinese rocketmen corps). Superbly efficient military ethics made it like clockwork. Yes, even morality can help an army directly.
Genghis Khan, like Muhammad before him, taught his followers that they should keep all their energy to fight others, rather than to kill each other.
Xi Xia Could Not Fly Away From Mongols
Yet, morality is not sufficient to rule. And morality is not just about posing. First, morality is about being smart, as instructed by history.
We don’t have the money to feed the hungry, whine the silly ones, and they propose to cut fundamental research about life or the universe. For the silly ones, understanding the universe is a deeply felt tragedy. After all, it goes against their grain.
The truth, though, is that hunger has to do with war. And war is something that needs to be understood, because war has always been the ultimate arbiter of the fate of civilizations.
Under Stalin’s USSR, one hundred million adult Russians ruled over half a billion people, then 20% of humanity.
The greatest Buddhist polity, ever, was an empire, the Western Xia, the Xi Xia, south of Mongolia.
Bad Location For Weakness
Xi Xia got the bad idea to enslave a young Genghis Khan. Xi Xia was eradicated, just as the Buddhist empire that covered most of India earlier, was eradicated. Thereafter, Buddhism lost influence.
Repeating word for word dictator Putin’s lies is no way to understand war, or history. But it’s a good way to let plutocracy, led by a brute, triumph, and bury civilization.
The average wealth of 110 million adult Russians in 2013 was $11,000. However the median wealth was $870. Thus, if wealth was equally distributed in Russia, the average Russian would be 12 times richer. But don’t worry, oh silly ones who love Putin because he is a strong master of weakness: revolution in Russia won’t happen tomorrow. 110 Russian billionaires, Putin’s Pretorian guard from hell, detain 35% of Russia’s wealth.
The first time that I heard that giving food to people as if they were pigeons was more important than learning to think better, I was a child and men were landing on the Moon. A family of austere European people, oozing with contempt, informed me that my moral system was completely skewed. Instead of watching the lunar surface, mesmerized, I should have empathy about feeding the poor, and spite for those who had preoccupations that went beyond filling the plates.
However, I was from Africa. And what I gathered on that deprived continent, was that understanding is the most important food there is. Food and peace come from understanding, not the other way around. And understanding is one: what we learn from nature bring us models that carry to humanity, as humanity, and its world, are of and within, nature.
If one wants to fight malnutrition in Africa, one had to understand the world, first. Those European people who denied that struck me, not just as posers, but as hypocrites on the side of exploitation, whether they knew it, or not (BTW, BHL falls directly under that critique, as I explained in the past!).
I knew well that people were not starving from lack of food, but from lack of organization to provide them with food.
In the following decades, it turned out that starvation and war ravaged Africa. It was certainly from empires, the wrong sort of empires.
The empires of plutocrats and local kinglets and warlords. For example the philosopher BHL ravaged the primary forests of Africa, and made lots of money, power and influence for himself, with the complicity of the French presidents. He was one of many. The crimes of those associated to Coltan, Rwanda and some high tech companies in the USA were much greater: more than 6 million died in the ensuing war.
At this point, the potential world agricultural food production is enough for about 12 billion people. However, subsidies are given for agriculture in the richest countries: that is a sneaky form of exploitation, as it makes the less developed parts of the world dependent upon the agribusiness of the richest, by killing local food production (and thus, in the long run, killing by starvation the local population).
Advanced countries agricultural subsidies are a form of war and exploitation of the most disadvantaged (and also a war against the biosphere, as they typically involve unsustainable methods).
This also means that, wherever there are starving people it’s from war. As observed. Thus, putting a bag of rice on one’s shoulder is not optimal: it’s an irrelevance, and an hypocrisy.
What’s needed is an empire, an empire of justice, not an empire of more rice. Justice brings rice, rice does not bring justice.
Imperial Fail: What’s Left Of Xia
This has been understood to some (small) extent: the International Criminal Court has judged exclusively (so far) African leaders.
One needs much more understanding in how the human mind works.
Fortunately, Hitler, and his cortege of plutocrats was seen before. Now that Putin and his cortege of plutocrats is in plain sight, there may be enough understanding to not repeat the same mistakes about how to treat the collective madness.
All the more as, and I explained this thoroughly, see my: “Reverse Yalta, Free Ukraine!”, the present madness is a direct continuation of one started more than 100 years ago. The study systems of thoughts can exhibit astounding continuity, from the Kaiser, to Czar Putin.
Indeed fascist imperialist Prussian Plutos were best friends with Lenin and Stalin. After the latter were ferried by the former in a special train from Switzerland (always neutral except in the matter of making money) to Russia, the latter promptly made peace, offering to the Kaiser Eastern Europe. The alliance between Stalinists and Hitlerists became official in August 1939, in a vain attempt to dissuade the French Republic to launch a world war. But that alliance had been going on, all along, as the USSR allowed renascent German fascism to turn around the safeguards the Versailles Treaty had set against massive German re-militarization.
Psychologically, we have the same set-up as usual: the plutocrats in Moscow, with their giant bank accounts in Londongrad, feel they have the Western democracies by the throat, same as their ancestors in the 1930s, when they called Berlin home.
Confronted to force serving evil, only a greater and smarter force can win. For once, Obama has been acting near to perfection. Putin did not attack this week, as he wants to look benign before the United Nations General Assembly vote tomorrow. But make no mistake: his generals are telling him time works against him, and the rest of Ukraine is for him to take.
As I explained in 1938?, Hitler moved against Austria before a free vote could be held. After conquering Austria, and Crimea, Hitler, and Putin, were able to organize referenda with exactly 97%, for their dictatorships.
Ukraine is to vote May 25. Putin’s tanks will attack before that, except if he gets persuaded something horrendous lays in his future, should he do so. Can the West look sufficiently scary? That is the question.
War primes everything. War makes history. That, Putin, former head of the Russian Gestapo (KGB, FSB) knows all too well.
Patrice Aymé
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 